“To the mother whose baby is still..." (the letter I read on Happy Mum, Happy Baby)

It’s been a week since publication day, and in that time I’ve been so lucky to share the most beautiful moments of connection - both at events and online - with people who have either already been touched by the novel, or who heard me on Happy Mum, Happy Baby with Giovanna Fletcher, where I spoke about my pregnancy loss journey with Poppy, a life-changing experience which inspired my novel This Wasn’t Meant to Happen.

Quite honestly, I’ve been overwhelmed by the response to the episode, from mothers sharing their own stories and babies forever in their hearts, to others simply offering kindness and empathy - and I can’t tell you how much it has meant. I’ve also had many messages asking if I might share the letter I read out on the podcast.

So this week’s Substack is just that: the words I read, now here in writing. Please do pass it on to anyone you feel might need it, whether they are in the very darkest days of this journey, or many years on. With Baby Loss Awareness Week approaching, I hope these words might offer even a small sense of comfort or connection. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for the generosity you’ve shown in responding.

Here is the letter, with all my love…

To the mother whose baby is still, but who is still a mother…

I know your pain: the shock, the disbelief, the trauma. Your brain can’t register it, but your body feels it in every single cell. Your heart is obliterated by it. You are shell-shocked. Cell-shocked. You don’t know how you’ll survive the next minute, let alone the next week. You don’t know who you are anymore, now that you’re a mother without her baby in her arms. It’s incomprehensible because they are still embedded under your skin. Their handprint pressed tightly against your broken heart.

Perhaps, like me, you have other children who need you. They are your world, and you will survive this for them. They will put you back together even as your heart breaks again for them. Perhaps this was your first pregnancy, and the emptiness feels colossal. You may not have the routines of parenthood, but you know the depths of love through your loss. That is where your journey begins.

At first, survival feels like silence. But silence is suffocating. You don’t know what to say, or how to reach out, but you know you need people - friends, family - to be there so you can say aloud: My baby died, and I don’t know where to begin. That is how you begin. If they don’t know how to answer, find the people who know your pain, too. They can help you.

You wonder how life could throw you such a tragic curveball, but within the devastation comes clarity: how lucky you are to hold, to nurture, to love the children who are here. Or to love the people that you love, and who love you. You may not know how to survive living when your baby isn’t, but the ones who are will be the place you always return to.

You’ll learn that grief is messy. But so is life. That you don’t have to do it perfectly. Some days, just breathing in and out feels a lot. (Adriene Mishler can help you here.) On others, you manage to put one foot in front of the other. Some days, you run. Further and faster than before, because out in nature is where you feel close to your baby. You are running towards them, not away.

You won’t go back to who you were before, even though the people around you really want you to. You try, and you fail. And then you feel worse. You want to beg them to let you wear your grief as a cloak to keep your baby’s memory close.

You’ll learn that wearing that cloak allows you to carry them with you, in the way you mother your children, your friends’ children, your nieces and nephews, yourself, or how you allow yourself to be mothered. Maybe in the way you’ll mother another baby, or babies.

Science will tell you that you still carry your baby in your body, in your tissue, your organs. They are part of you forever. But you already know this, because your heart told you so.

And then one day, you’ll wake up and realise you’re living with more gratitude, appreciation, and purpose, and with a kind of determined, rebellious joy that acknowledges grief, accepts it - even, but also tells it firmly that if it is to be a permanent fixture, it must now add to your life, not take any more from it. As Cheryl Strayed wrote in Tiny Beautiful Things: “You can’t go on as you have before, so you must go on as you never have.”

There will always be cracks in your heart that only they can fill. But it’s there, in those cracks, that the light shines through, and your infinite love will render them gold.

You know you are a mother, still. And always will be.

With love, hope and gratitude,